The Consequences of Factory Farming Are Too Large to Ignore

Factory farming is often brushed aside as a niche concern, but it's one of the largest—and most ignored—sources of suffering, environmental destruction, and human harm in the world today.

As this newsletter has grown, I’ve started to reach new audiences, ones who don’t already buy into the importance of meat reduction. That’s great! I love reaching new people! But, to make sure we are all on the same page, I’ve decided to write out the definitive reasons why I think meat reduction is a critical social issue, likely the most overlooked social issue in our society today.

Entire books can be written about this topic (in fact, many have), but I aim to summarize the most important facts and arguments here, organized into harms to animals, the environment, and humans. Consider this resource comprehensive but not exhaustive: a way to distill the reasons behind meat reduction advocacy and clarify our mission going forward.

Animal Agriculture is a Moral Atrocity — Here’s Why

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’re an animal lover. I am too! I believe animals are individuals, worthy of consideration and care, and deserving of a life of beauty and free from suffering. Unfortunately, our species has designed a food production system that doesn’t live up to those ideals.

Most people’s mental images of animal farms — red barns, green fields, and overall-wearing ranchers — don’t match reality. In agriculture, factory farming is the norm, not an exception. In the United States, over 99% of animals raised for food are raised on factory farms, while worldwide it’s 94%. Factory farms are characterized by confining many animals in super tiny spaces, often in cages, and depriving them of sunlight, access to the outdoors, or even the ability to be with their friends and family.

This confinement creates huge problems for animals. Most farmers define welfare as animals being free from disease or injury, which isn’t exactly how most people think of welfare. If you had a healthy dog who lived her entire life in a kennel without access to sunlight, toys, nature, or other animals, would you define that as high welfare? I personally wouldn’t. Even farms with higher welfare standards suffer from this problem: the mental states of farmed animals are completely ignored. Research backs up what you and I see: hens in cages exhibit symptoms of depression.

The types of animals on farms matter too. Have you ever met one of those dogs, like a bulldog or pug, that has been selectively bred for so long that their genetics now cause serious breathing problems? Well, the exact same thing is happening to farmed animals, except they’re being genetically bred to grow faster and fatter, not to maximize cuteness. Chickens, turkeys, cows, pigs, and more have all been getting fatter and fatter, which is great for producing cheap meat but an absolute disaster for welfare. Chickens can now develop heart disease in their first few months of life; pigs grow fatter and produce more piglets per litter; hens lay far more eggs than before.

Credit: We Animals Media

The scale of the problem today exceeds human comprehension. Every year, we slaughter 85 billion land animals, 300 billion aquatic animals, and 100 billion insects. For contrast, about 62 million humans die every year — a rounding error compared to farmed animals. My graphing software is literally incapable of showing a percentage that small visually:

Most people probably believe that humans are more morally valuable than animals. Even if that’s true, if you believe that animal lives are worth 100 times less than human lives (heck, even 10,000 times less!), the sheer scale of animals trapped in factory farms would mean that farmed animal suffering has moral worth.

If you’ve ever spent significant time with an animal, you probably already know what researchers have confirmed: they can feel pain, they have inner lives, they experience a spectrum of emotions, can use tools, create their own cultures, and they bond fiercely with one another. Yes, even fish. Animals aren’t cogs in a machine that we can wipe away from our moral framework. They matter.

Animal Agriculture is Gobbling Up Land and Choking the Planet

There are two main ways that animal agriculture harms the planet: directly (through greenhouse gas emissions) and indirectly (through land use change, especially deforestation).

Ruminant animals like cows and sheep naturally emit methane as a part of their digestive system processing — you might have heard that they have multiple stomachs. Well, all those stomachs produce a lot of gas. When we combine those emissions with other things like manure, we are looking at 16.5% of global emissions, at a minimum¹. That seems like a lot! But we have to remember that the number of animals bred into existence now is not natural — it’s human-designed. 57% of mammals on Earth by biomass are farmed, while wild animals are only 5%. There’s nothing natural about how we farm animals.

However, in my opinion, land-use change is more important than direct emissions and is far less discussed. About 35% of Earth’s land is used for animal agriculture. Why? It’s not just the animal farms and slaughterhouses, but also for all the plots of corn, soy, and wheat that are grown to make animal feed. If you’ve ever gone on a road trip through rural areas and seen rows and rows of corn stalks, those farms are probably growing food for animals, not humans.

Animal agriculture’s land use footprint is driving deforestation across the world. 41% of global tropical deforestation is driven by beef production. All of this land could be rewilded, which has the potential to offset 68% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Credit: Hannah Ritchie, Our World in Data

“When you eat a burger, you’re not just eating a cow. You’re eating macaws and jaguars and the rest of the cast of Rio. You’re eating the Amazon. You’re eating the earth.” – Michael Grunwald

All of this land use change harms biodiversity by robbing native species of their homes. (Keep in mind that “biodiversity loss” is scientist-speak for animals or plants going extinct or endangered). Animal products, alongside specific plant-based crops like coffee, are supercharging extinction rates worldwide. A recent study quantified how this looks compared to several diets:

Credit: Ball et. al., 2025

Taken together, vegan diets have one-fourth the carbon footprint of high-meat diets, one-third the negative impact on biodiversity, and half of the impact on water usage.

I want to stress that this research is rock-solid, decades-old, and not meaningfully debated in the scientific community. Scholars from FAO, Nature, World Resources Institute, Science, The Lancet, Frontiers, Greenpeace, Cambridge, Oxford, and many more all agree — animal farming is a massive threat to Earth and her inhabitants. Anything to the contrary is likely part of Big Meat’s disinformation campaign, which they borrowed from Big Oil.

Humans Are Victims As Much As Animals

The lives of humans and animals are deeply intertwined, so much so that it’s impossible to talk about harms to one without discussing harms to the other. This is the bedrock for a concept called “One Health”: an approach to optimize the health of people, animals, and environments alike.

Factory farms and slaughterhouses are hotbeds for labor rights abuses: frequently hiring vulnerable populations like undocumented immigrants, who comprise 37-47% of U.S. farm laborers, since the job is so unpleasant. Children, too. Meat companies like JBS and Tyson are embroiled in child labor lawsuits left and right. Meat workers routinely make up some of the most dangerous professions possible, according to data from OSHA — 81% of meatpackers are at risk of serious injury, while agriculture has the highest worker death rate of any industry worldwide.

“[…] The United States is failing to meet its obligations under international human rights standards to protect the human rights of meat and poultry industry workers.” — Human Rights Watch

Slaughterhouse workers are usually people who don’t have any other options: in order to feed their families, they are forced to commit acts of violence on animals, which takes a massive toll. They often suffer from a condition known as perpetration-induced traumatic stress, in which they experience emotional detachment and increased aggression as a result of enacting violence on animals. This can’t be reformed — a higher minimum wage or better labour unions can help with some things, but they can’t undo the psychic pressure from constant killing. Only reducing meat demand can do that.

There’s a better way. Investing in plant-based agriculture, especially alternative protein, could also create jobs and boost the economy. As I explored in an earlier piece, a shift to a vegan diet can create 83 million new jobs by 2050 and potentially save 7 trillion USD.

It’s not just workers who’d benefit from meat reduction, but everyone who eats meat themselves. Since animal protein is a significant risk factor in developing many chronic diseases like heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes, and all-cause mortality, a FAO report estimates that dietary shifts to veganism could save 14 million lives.

Animal agriculture even harms vegans, albeit indirectly. Animal agriculture has caused 37% of zoonotic diseases in the last 80 years. Factory farms also account for 70% of all antibiotics worldwide, increasing the threat of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Taken together, it’s no surprise that the UN listed “increasing demand for animal protein” as the number one driver of emerging zoonotic diseases like COVID-19. I don’t want to repeat 2020, do you?

This Problem is Expected to Worsen

Unfortunately, consumption of animal products is expected to rise over the next few decades. For starters, the human population is expected to grow, but more importantly, people tend to eat more meat as their incomes rise — in fact, average income is the best predictor of a country’s level of meat consumption.

This means that meat reduction will become more and more important as time ticks on. A recent paper found that 44% of the Earth’s population needs to change their diets (primarily through meat reduction) to achieve only 2 degrees of global warming (keep in mind, if you are a citizen of a developed country who eats meat, you are almost certainly in that 44% bucket). By 2050, it will be 91% of people. In other words, big meat-eaters are fueling climate change now and will make it even worse in the future.

Unlike poverty, infant mortality, literacy, child labor, or life expectancy, meat consumption is expected to get worse before it gets better. Unlike climate change, we haven’t seen meaningful meat reduction policies or global summits a la the Paris Climate Accords. This problem is horribly neglected.

I’m a data guy. I love seeing rows and rows of beautiful columns, charts, and graphs, each one giving me more insight about how the world around me works. But sometimes I have to stop myself and remember that every single number represented here is an individual, deserving of the same care and respect we would give a pet. A tiny uptick on this chart represents billions of animals, animals who can feel pain, experience joy, and express community. It also represents tons more greenhouse gases clogging the atmosphere and millions of people who experience worse health as a result. We need to figure out how to make the line go down.

Every Potential Solution Involves Meat Reduction. Every Single One.

Usually, this is where the conversation stops: yes, factory farming is bad for animals, humans, and the planet, so we should reform it. But there’s another fact, usually omitted from the conversation, that some people may find uncomfortable: there is no way to fix our food system without changing our collective diets, specifically reducing meat consumption. None. Zilch. Zero.

Don’t get me wrong: some systems improve upon our existing reality, but for any of them to work, they need to involve changes to our diets. Take regenerative agriculture. It’s a loosely defined set of farming practices designed to improve soil health, including holistic grazing, in which ruminant animals graze across different pastures to enhance soil health. Advocates claim regenerative agriculture can be carbon-negative because the benefits to the soil’s carbon sequestration outweigh the cows’ methane emissions.

Even if this were true, there’s one massive problem: land. According to an industry-funded study, a fully regenerative system can sequester carbon… but would require 2.5 times the land we currently use². Okay, let’s do the math here: animal agriculture currently uses 4 billion hectares of land, so if we switched conventional agriculture to regenerative, we’d need 10 billion hectares, which is about half of all land on Earth!

Switching from beef to chicken may be a small win for the climate, but a disaster for animal welfare. Since chickens are so small, we need to kill 200 times as many individuals to produce the same amount of meat as a single cow (researchers call this the small body problem). Meat reduction is really the only way to benefit both the climate and the animals.

I’ve researched other potential climate solutions before, and none of them hold up. Red seaweed used to be a hot topic until recent real-world studies failed to find any meaningful improvement. Grass-fed and local meat completely fall flat. Methane masks? Give me a break.

The data is clear: there is no way to eat meat that’s more sustainable than eating less of it.

Or let’s consider animal welfare. Farmers aren’t cruel to their animals because they’re psychopaths, but because it’s the most efficient way to meet growing demand for meat. To produce 360 million tonnes of meat worldwide annually, animal farmers choose fast-growing breeds, cram animals together to maximize space, and breed them as quickly as possible to increase production. If they increased welfare, they would not be able to meet current demand.

Researchers agree — there is no way to make our food production more sustainable and ethical without significantly reducing our meat consumption. Maybe there is a future in which most people eat animals raised on green pastures, who grew up munching on organic foods while playing together in the sunlight. But that is only possible if everyone eats meat once, maybe twice a week.

When I started this Substack, I debated framing it around factory farming, but I ultimately decided it wasn’t good enough. There’s an elephant in the room we need to address: there is no meaningful anti-factory farming position without meat reduction.

Opposing Factory Farming is a Mainstream Opinion

There’s one powerful fact at our disposal: most people already oppose factory farming, at least in principle. When polled, a large majority of people say that animals deserve moral consideration, that they’re concerned about factory farming practices, or even that we should restrict or abolish factory farming altogether.

While people have an innate sense that factory farming is wrong, they typically support it economically. This represents a departure from other historical social movements: meat reduction is popular, but difficult to achieve. Other movements — marriage equality, civil rights, women’s suffrage — faced the opposite problem: minimal public support but less impact on others’ lives. It’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, changes in people’s lives may create barriers, but the underlying level of agreement can help forge coalitions to drive change.

Meat Reduction Is a Nascent, But Fervent, Social Movement

There are countless organizations working to reduce meat consumption. Alternative protein companies number in the thousands — from Heura to Impossible Foods to Essential to Omni — and are scaling up more sustainable and ethical foods worldwide, while incubators like the Good Food Institute work to secure more funding and legal rights.

Many groups are working to get people accustomed to meat reduction, little by little. Veganuary has successfully helped 25 million people go vegan for one month each year, of whom 81%³ maintain a reduced meat diet afterwards. Better Food Foundation (a group I frequently work with) is helping redesign social norms around meat by making plants the default option. Other groups, like Proveg or Dansk Vegetarisk Forening, are lobbying governments to create more laws to promote plant-based foods, such as investing in alternative proteins, removing animal ag subsidies, and regulating meat companies more closely. There are countless more, on every continent⁴, with dozens of strategies, ideas, and missions.

Still, I believe this issue is extremely neglected. When’s the last time you heard someone on the news talk about meat reduction in a sincere way? Do you have any politicians representing you who have voted for resolutions to work on meat consumption? How often do you hear climate advocates talking about agriculture or meat consumption as a campaign goal? One reason is that meat reduction isn’t very well funded. Global funding for animal protection NGOs is only about $250 million, which sounds like a lot until you realize that it’s about the same as the salaries of a single Premier League football team. There is a lot of room for growth here — imagine what we could do with double, triple, quintuple that amount.

It’s an uphill battle, but we’re making some headway. Meat consumption in the EU is expected to fall 1.3% over the next decade, driven by huge reductions in plant-forward countries like Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

It’s not enough, not nearly enough, but it is promising.

You’ve Come to the Right Place

Well, that’s my pitch! I believe reducing our collective consumption of meat is not only imperative for the future of humanity, animal-kind, and the Earth, but it is also one of the most neglected social issues of our time. The planet matters. Humans, embroiled in factory farming operations or not, matter. And, of course, animals matter.

If you understand why reducing meat is important, this Substack is for you. I don’t care if you’re vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian, or a meat-lover — it’s your motivation that matters, not your diet. Here, I am less interested in the why and more in the how. How do we scale up meat reduction initiatives? What are the best policies to pursue? What psychological and sociological factors do we need to consider?

Change is never easy, but it is always possible. Let’s chip away at it together.

Thank you

Thank you for reading! I always make these resources available for free, but please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you find my work valuable.

1. Different papers yield slightly different estimates of GHG emissions from animal agriculture. For a full review, check out this Breakthrough Institute report.

2. There are a whole host of other problems with regenerative animal farming: the offsets are temporary, not permanent, and there are plenty of other ways to improve soil health that don’t involve animal farming. It’s true that grazing is better for the soil and carbon sequestration than single-crop farming, but rewilding the land is better than both. In other words, transitioning from animal-based to plant-based food systems is still always better than transitioning from conventional to regenerative agricultural practices.

3. Due to the survey methodology, this number is likely somewhat inflated. For a complete rundown of vegan challenges, read this piece I wrote last year.

4. Antarctica pending.